Dumbstruck
by sap1066
Summary: 'P.S. I love you too,' he said.' Nine/Rose. Sex. Romance. Babel fish.
1. Chapter 1

And one morning, as she was leaning against the console, idly flicking switches the Doctor turned to her and she didn't understand a word he said. In fact, the first time, she didn't realise he was speaking to her at all.

The sudden rush of mellifluous sound into her ears stilled her random movements, her hand stretched in mid air. It was haunting, beautiful, the timbre rich and dark, reminding her of underground, soft and silent things. She raised her eyebrows, looked down curiously at the dials — she had clearly hit the right button somewhere. The noise came again, crawling down her spine, making her shiver. It was possibly the most sensual thing she had ever heard, she thought. She didn't want it to stop. It did. Released from the spell, her hand fell back onto the panel. The silence was like a dash of iced water, but she jumped even more when she felt his strong fingers wrap themselves around her wrist, tugging her hand away from the controls.

She looked up at him in surprise, and then in shock as she saw his mouth moving and the glorious sound enveloped her again. Without thinking, her hand streaked out to touch him, his lips yielding but slightly rough against the tremulous pressure of her fingertips. She realised belatedly that she must be hearing him speak, in his own language, which the TARDIS, for some reason, had forgotten to translate. She hoped it would forget for a bit longer. She didn't think she had ever touched his mouth before, couldn't remember ever wanting to know the feel of his skin, and she saw his blue eyes wide with bewilderment, a hint of something else running for cover in their depths. She hesitated a bit too long, suddenly realised that she was standing right in the middle of the room with her hand over his mouth, dropped it in confusion and stepped back, a glow of embarrassment warming her cheeks.

He spoke again, but she managed to concentrate this time, shaking her head at him. 'I can't understand a word you're saying,' she said, and she saw him start slightly, narrowing his eyes in suspicion at the control panel.

He took a few steps away, pushing buttons, spinning levers and dials, typing commands and in the sudden freedom of her arm she noted that he had been holding onto her for a good few minutes. He turned, said something else beautifully incomprehensible. Smiling, she raised a hand to her ear, indicating her lack of understanding. He didn't seem to find it funny, tried another set of controls, spoke again. Her smile widening, she shook her head. He took out the sonic screwdriver, ran it over part of the console then shifted a panel out from the floor and climbed down into the hole. She put her feet up on the jumpseat, yawned, and stretched, waiting for him to make whatever minor repair was necessary. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw him watching her, caught a blur of movement as his head whipped back round to the circuit boards as she turned for a closer look.

Eventually, he climbed out of the floor, his face like thunder, and she could read his frustration in the way he braced his arms against the engine column, tapping his foot impatiently.

He looked at her before she spoke. 'What's the matter with it?' she asked, guessing that he wouldn't be able to understand her.

He kicked the bottom of the column eloquently.

'Ah, broken,' she responded.

He glared over at her, said something that she would have bet money was sarcastic. Even without being able to understand him, she found it was easy to divine what he was thinking, the movements of his body telling a story she already knew. Consciously studying him for the first time, she wondered how long she must have spent watching him without noticing she was doing it.

She flattened one hand, and mimed writing on it with the other. He gave her a disgusted look and stomped out of the room, only to return again a couple of minutes later with a notepad and pen. He scribbled on it for a while and threw it across to her, but despite turning it over and over she couldn't tell what it said. Either his handwriting was terrible or the TARDIS had stopped translating altogether.

She had a thought, drew a picture of a stick man on the next page — maybe she couldn't read his writing, but a picture was a picture in any language. Sticking her tongue between her teeth, she gave the stick man a tiny black jacket and drew a pen shaped object with a shiny blue light on the end in its hand. Although she was concentrating, she could feel him moving across the room towards her, so attuned to his presence that she could have found him with her eyes closed. By the time she was finished he was leaning over the back of the seat behind her, his head nearly on her shoulder as he watched. She could feel him breathing against her neck and her body gave an unconscious shudder all on its own. She hoped he hadn't noticed. It was only because the silence in the room was so unusual that she noticed herself.

He reached over, tapped the picture, tapped himself, looking at her with his eyebrows raised. She shot him a grin, shook her head, deliberately adding a large pair of ears and a big nose to the drawing before handing him the pad and nodding. He screwed up his face into a mock smile, pretending to hold his sides in silent laughter. But the jewel bright look he threw her as he walked to the other side of the room showed that he was not annoyed.

With quick movements of his hands he produced a blank space on one wall, retrieved some sort of a pen and handed it her, his fingers brushing hers lightly, as she stopped next to him. He drew on the space and sparkling lines of colour appeared under his hand. A blue rectangle, and two stick figures, the second with squiggles of blonde hair. He added a dotted line between the head of the first figure to the box, and then another line between the box and the head of the blonde. He crossed out the last line with scribbles of his pen. It wasn't hard to tell what he meant, whatever was wrong with the translation circuit was affecting her connection with the TARDIS.

Her skin was still unaccountably alive with the trace of his fingers, gentle and fleeting though it had been. She stepped up to the board, drew four round circles - faces with open mouths. Following his lead, she put a line between them, crossed it out, looking at him questioningly. Could they talk to each other at all?

He shook his head.

She drew another face with a smile turned downwards. He sneaked a look at her, approached the board, drew a sad face of his own. He wanted to speak to her too. Opening his arms he closed the few paces between them to embrace her, a companionable hug they had shared many times. And if she felt he was holding her a bit more tightly, and for just a bit longer than necessary she put it down to his need to communicate something that he couldn't say.

Letting her go at last, he cleared the board, hiding his face as he began a far more intricate diagram, some sort of structural chart or wiring design, complete with arrows to other parts of the drawing and the suspicion of labels. She pressed her hand against the small of his back and felt him give a tiny jump, a sharp movement quickly silenced. She probably wouldn't have spotted it if she hadn't been giving him all her attention. She couldn't remember if he always moved that way when she touched him, the same way that she seemed to be reacting when he touched her. She gestured at the board and shook her head wordlessly. It was too complicated for her. She took the pen from his hand — and there was a definite flinch there - and drew a banana. She was only a stupid ape after all. He stared at the drawing, frowned down into her eyes, put out his hand, and ran it down her arm from her shoulder to her elbow, an apology, before he turned away. She was a bit disturbed to find that the side of her breast was tingling where his hand had slid past and that there was a definite throb starting somewhere she didn't even want to think about.

Unless she was very careful, she thought, she was going to start seeing him in an entirely different light. Her body appeared to be reacting spontaneously, outside her control, or maybe she was just concentrating on its reactions a bit more, now that she wasn't so focused on what she wanted to say. Maybe, she thought, this sort of silent communion had been going on between them for some time but she had been listening too hard to see it.

He was drawing again, more little pictures, the TARDIS was in one, and the two of them, and something that might have been water, but the drawings were too disjointed and she couldn't see how they would fit together into a story. He spent a few minutes pointing in turn at the images as she got more confused. Abruptly, he clicked his fingers as though a light had come on inside him and gave her a great, glowing smile. With a cheery wave, he headed out of the room.

She couldn't ask him where he was off to so she did the only useful thing she could think of, going to fetch a book on sign language from the library, the most dull, dispassionate place she could imagine to hide. Sometime later, when she had her knees up against the desk, cleaning out her fingernails with the pages of another useless tome she couldn't read, the gentle pressure of a finger tracing swiftly down her neck and coming to rest as part of a hand on her shoulder nearly jolted her out of her seat. The delicate intimacy of the touch sent a jolt somewhere else as well. Her shiver was unmissable this time.

He had to have done that on purpose, she thought, glancing up at him swiftly, but his expression was wide eyed, innocent. Perhaps he had just slipped. He was so pleased with himself he was positively shining at her. Bowing formally, he extended his arm, grinning with a boyish enthusiasm. Sighing, and kicking herself for imagining things that weren't there, she took his arm and let him lead her from the room. Stopping a couple of doors down, he bowed again, motioning for her to precede him. He didn't have to speak for her to realise how excited he was, practically hopping from foot to foot with his own cleverness.

When she opened the door it was dark. She saw a huge chair, plush in red velvet dominating the centre of the small chamber, ringed with drapes and curtains in similar shades. In front of the chair was a screen. It would have reminded her of a cinema, if cinemas had ever been built for two. And had ever been graced with seats so large they were practically beds. Uncertainly, she looked at him, but he waved her on, bouncing around the opposite wall and throwing himself onto the chair. She took a seat as far away from him as she could, trying to put back a bit of the distance her body seemed determined to remove.

He called out something in that lilting tongue and the lights dimmed even further and there was a clicking sound as the screen shuddered into life. Up came a picture of more curtains, and a hand entered the middle of the screen, pushing them aside to reveal a black piece of paper with something unintelligible written on it. A soundtrack started up, all tinkling piano and the crackle of distance. She looked at him, saw he was already watching her, the glint of his eyes intent in the darkness, the flash of his teeth. He had made her a silent movie.

Intermission


	2. Chapter 2

The black paper was removed. In its place, his hand, holding a paper cut out of a fish, red, and glittering with stuck on sequins and bits of gold paper, moving up and down as if swimming. She couldn't help but laugh, leaned back against the chair, relaxed, feeling his arm come around her in the shadows, a confident move belied by the slight shaking in his muscles that he couldn't quite hide. She curled her feet up on the seat, moulded herself against the strict lines of his side a bit more closely, feeling a slight fluttering in her stomach and a stutter in her heart.

On the screen, a box, coloured roughly in blue descended slowly into the centre of the picture, lowered by two familiar hands. The flaps opened, and the hands reached inside to remove a doll, some kind of action figure, clad only in a pair of combat trousers and big boots, its chest bare, all rippling torso and biceps. Around its neck was a tiny stethoscope. It was meant to be him. A burst of laughter exploded from her, her sides shaking with helpless tremors until the pressure of his arm forced her closer against his side, her head resting now on his leather clad shoulder, her hand placed for support on his stomach. Her heart was beating so wildly she was sure he could hear it. His hand traced intricate patterns against her arm but he kept his eyes fixed straight on the screen.

Next out of the box was another figure, exactly the same as the first, but wearing a tiny pink dress, which left its bulging pectorals exposed. A ball of yellow wool was on its head. She shifted her hand down, smacked his leg in retribution but left it lying there as the second doll went back in the box and out came another, a princess this time, complete with crown and big skirts. She gave him a little squeeze, feeling him tense and relax against her, shift his legs slightly further apart so she could fit her fingers over the hard curve of this thigh, into the warmth where his legs pressed together. She didn't look at him. He didn't look at her.

Together, the two figures were walked away from the box and across a strip of metal, laid across what looked for all the world like a fish tank. The princess was taken out of frame and in a close up shot she saw the other doll holding a fishing rod, hanging down into the water. The rod was pulled up, with a bit of green slime on the end, and the angle panned out, showing the two figures moving at a rate of knots back over the metal bridge towards the box. The camera swung round to show a paper chain of cut out fish rushing after the fleeing dolls. The doors of the box closed and it was lifted up off screen again. She sensed, rather than saw his head turn towards her in the darkness, the weight of his lips as he pressed a kiss against her hair feather light. She didn't dare move, afraid he would stop, afraid he would start.

Another black piece of paper replaced the first with symbols that could only mean 'The End'. The screen puttered into silence, tense, expectant. Ignoring the runaway pounding of her heart she inched her head hesitantly round to face him, finding him so close that their lips were almost, nearly, not quite touching, the heat of his breath warm in the recesses of her mouth. She was aware that her chest was rising and falling in an unsteady, arrhythmic pattern, but his hand had slipped down and under her shoulder and his fingertips were resting against the swell of her breast. Her hand was now clamped firmly between the warmth of his thighs. It took all her willpower to look up at him against the thick tension hanging between them. Most of his face was lost in pools of shadow but his gaze leaped out at her so brightly it burnt the darkness away. There was a hunger in his eyes, a heat, and a naked desire that she could feel deep down inside. She could sense the things he wanted to do to her hanging like a promise in the air. She was only capable of half formed images of what she wanted to do to him.

Abruptly, the lights came back up, and in the distraction he was off the chair like a coiled spring, heading out of the door and down the corridor before she realised he was gone.

When they finally left the TARDIS the dazzling radiance of sun reflecting on a grey-green sea punched into her eyes, and the clang of the metal walkway beneath her feet was deafening. The biting wind knifed through her clothing but it didn't take him long to find the spot he wanted, unravelling a long metal wire with some sort of box on the end and lowering it into the icy water. They had been only a few minutes but he was already looking around apprehensively. Catching whatever it was he wanted, he retracted the line, snapped the box shut, and motioned her urgently back towards the TARDIS. The clamour of other steps behind them broke her concentration and she glanced behind. They looked as much like fish as she was a princess. At least ten feet tall, and bright red, they had wide set mouths and a suggestion of gills and their skin had a distinctly oily sheen. But the legs on which they were advancing rapidly toward her showed they had been out of the sea for quite some time. The last thing she remembered as she felt herself trip and plummet headlong into the water was an outcry of syllables that sounded nothing like her name.

She woke, and her teeth were chattering. She couldn't move her fingers and her hair was plastered to her head. She was lying on her side, soaking wet but covered in something warm. Levering her eyes open a crack she saw she was in the console room, stretched out on the jumpseat and the Doctor's back was right in front of her as he worked on the controls.

He seemed to know she was awake intuitively, span on his heel and came to kneel in front of her. He was as wet as she was but it didn't seem to bother him. He put his hand against the chill skin of her forehead, her cheek, his eyes serious as he assessed her. She took a deep breath, tried to sit, although her hands were curled into claws with the cold.

She gestured towards the door, raised her eyebrows in a question. Throwing her an exasperated look he pointed to her, mimed her tripping, falling forward, flailing his arms above his head. His urgent actions stopped suddenly, and he put his arms up straight in the air, head hanging limply forward. The shock of the water temperature must have knocked her out. He pointed to himself, mimicked a dive and a swimming motion, and then he rushed over and kissed her.

It wasn't a kiss, exactly, her mouth was closed, but his was open and she could feel his breath pushing against her lips. Mouth to mouth resuscitation to bring her back to life, and it had exactly the same effect the second time. She was cold, she was shivering, she was dripping all over the seat, but the simple touch of his lips on hers made all of that irrelevant. Her body responded, responded and responded and wouldn't stop responding. What started as a shiver turned into an uncontrollable shudder as tendrils of ice cold fire snaked down her spine. Her back arched, her head tilted back, eyes closing and an absolute throb of sudden pleasure hit her between the legs. But as soon as he started kissing her he stopped, pulling back, looking slightly surprised, as if he hadn't really meant to do what he had just done.

She watched him, making a circling, continue movement with her hand — he still hadn't finished the story, and she was fairly sure she knew what was coming next. He blinked quickly, throwing off his distraction, mimed one handed swimming, dragging something behind him and then he took the key out of his pocket, showed her being carried inside. And he moved towards her to kiss her again. She was ready for him this time, opened her mouth as his lips met hers, felt him start, just a little, when he realised she was waiting for him.

For an infinite instant they hung there, neither moving, suspended on the brink of something new. But she felt her responses overtaking her again and in the same moment, he moved at last, his hands coming up to cup her face, shifting so that he was sitting next to her. She opened her mouth wide against the light touch of his, felt his jaw move as he followed her lead and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him in. She wanted him. She didn't need to tell him. He crushed her lips against his, opening his mouth wider, wider against hers, encouraging her to do the same, to match the pattern he was setting. His tongue ran round the inside of her lips, tasting her, feeling her, checking her warmth. He pushed himself further in, and she reacted in kind, finding his mouth cool, but soft behind the slight rasp of his lips. Their tongues met, sliding across each other in a sensual dance that became stronger and stronger, more forceful, more probing. He was kissing her so hard she barely had room to draw breath, but she hooked her hands around his neck more tightly to stop him pulling away. The cold and the wet was forgotten, she was warmed by the rush of her heart, running so fast it felt as if it would explode through her chest, warmed by the hot wetness she could feel below, the aching pleasure spreading upwards with a repetitive tightening that was almost painful.

She didn't think she had ever responded so strongly to anyone before. And it was more than simply the quick reflexes of her body; the fact of kissing him seemed to fill her with a bone deep elation, a happiness so strong she wanted to hug herself with the wanton joy of it. But kissing him wasn't enough. She craved the feel of his hands on her breasts, his tongue between her spread legs, his length juddering inside her. Feverishly, she slid her hands down his chest and was amazed at the sensation of him shivering beneath her touch. She wasn't the only one whose body was responding.

She didn't bother with his jumper, went straight for the button of his jeans. She wanted him, was desperate for him, feeling his hands smooth over her breasts on their way down to the ache between her legs. The pace of their kiss increased as he touched her through her jeans, his hand pushing her legs apart, the sodden fabric forced against her warmth making her tremble. He moaned in his throat, fumbling as he undid the button, cracked down the zip, and she raised herself up off the seat to let him pull her trousers away. Impatient with her efforts for him, his fingers closed over hers, releasing the fastening of his jeans and guiding her hand until she closed it around him.

She felt his fingers prying into her hot wetness, going straight to the small fold of flesh that would make her gasp. She nearly came when he touched it for the first time, but settled for a muted cry and a convulsive tightening of her hand that made him groan into her mouth. She shunted her hips forward to the edge of the seat, dropping one leg to rest on the floor, reaching out to take him in both hands, squeezing and rubbing, stroking and sliding and circling until the wetness underneath her fingers let her know just how he felt about her caress.

Finding a new angle, his fingers thrust up inside her as her back curved, nearly breaking the kiss. He stretched her, from the inside out, matching the movements of his other hand, working her in ever harder, ever faster patterns. Her body wanted him, she wanted him, he wanted her. Pulling back from his mouth at last, she took what she wanted, throwing her leg across his lap to straddle him, feeling him guide her down with this hands on her hips. He was bigger than she had known, fitting her and filling her and making her eyes flutter open as he hit the barrier deep inside her.

He was watching her face, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, panting through parted lips. She raised her hips up off him again, slid back down, controlling her pace with her thighs as she started to move. She was soaking wet both inside and out, but she couldn't have cared less. He leaned back against the seat, breathing hard, one hand welded to the place between her legs, stoking her cries, his other forcing her hips down, on top of him.

They didn't need words, their language was in the motion of their bodies, the convulsive tightening of her muscles around him, the iron thickness that he was driving inside her. She was so close to orgasm, so lost in her responses that she almost missed the message her body was screaming at her, had been screaming at her for hours.

As soon as she saw it, it was obvious. Although she knew he wouldn't understand she told him anyway.

'I love you,' she said, as the waves of pleasure washed over her.

'I love you,' as he sat up, wrapped his arms about her, shuddered his climax into her.

'I love you,' as she collapsed against him, exhausted with release.

She felt his hand searching for something under the discarded blanket, came up holding the notebook and pen. She didn't have the strength to look as he scribbled on it with one hand, the other stroking the line of her bottom. Pushed the pad into her hand.

Amazing what you hear when you don't speak, it read. Clear as day, black and white, she could read exactly what he'd written. Suspiciously she looked at him, wondering just when he'd fixed the translation circuit, but he just winked at her, and leaned close to whisper in her ear.

'P.S. I love you, too,' he said.

If you enjoyed this story, please read The Postman's Daughter or The Car Crash Bride by Sally Anne Palmer, two romance novels available electronically and in print via Amazon.


End file.
